


love on the water, love underwater (and so on)

by rudimentaryflair



Category: Free!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Don't copy to another site, Introspection, M/M, Not Beta Read, heavily influenced by richard siken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 20:15:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30145026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rudimentaryflair/pseuds/rudimentaryflair
Summary: You want something to chase you? Then run.
Relationships: Nanase Haruka & Tachibana Makoto, Nanase Haruka/Tachibana Makoto
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	love on the water, love underwater (and so on)

Maybe it starts that night at the swim club, with the shadows drawing waves across the tiles and their clothes soaked through with chlorine water, the air thick and humid with the promise of summer. They are standing in the middle of an abandoned pool and Makoto is telling Haru that he loves him. 

It’s redundant, almost. He’s in junior high. He knows these things. He knows how to do a flip turn and how to shoot a three-pointer; he knows that he loves Haru and that Haru loves him. Saying it out loud is really just a matter of principle, and yet as Makoto looks at him—at the startling blue of his eyes and the water running down his face in rivulets, glistening under the stars thrown above them—the words tug at some half-buried truth he knows, and he feels for all the world like he’s just done something wonderful and terrible, made beautiful art out of a death sentence. 

-

Maybe it starts that morning at the bottom of Haru’s staircase, with Makoto fixing his friend’s uniform collar as he has done a million times before, and nothing is different except everything is different, his fingers trembling on the buttons of Haru’s throat and every slow beat of his heart another damning testimony. 

There’s a warmth at the center of him, a warmth so great and burning that he’s afraid his body, despite how large it is, will still be too small to contain it. In that moment, he is thankful that his ribs are cages, as the thing they’ve been concealing for all these years finally unfurls and earns a name, a ruinous name that threatens to unravel him completely at the seams. 

A grain of it escapes onto his cheeks in a small blush, and Haru looks at him quizzically as he pulls his hands away and spins towards the door, flustered. The excuse that they’re going to be late for school is already out his mouth by the time he steps over the threshold.

-

Maybe it doesn’t matter when it starts, maybe it didn’t start anywhere. Maybe it was always there, vast and endless like the ocean he so fears. 

Maybe, he fears this too.

-

His mother used to say Haru’s first love was water, and that everything else came later. Sometimes Makoto thinks about how the universe works, with everything coming from and returning to the same dust. The ocean and Haru from the same stars, returning to each other. Sometimes he wonders if that’s why he’s pulled there too, to Haru in the water and the beautiful way he swims. 

The body betrays itself, after all. It pales and blushes, trembles and shakes. The body betrays itself, and Makoto’s is a particularly traitorous one, always at the end of the pool with a hand outstretched or sitting beside an overflowing bathtub, shaking him awake in class and pulling him away from fountains. Makoto knocking on the old wooden door of Haru’s house and walking beside him home. 

The body betrays itself: he stands frozen at the end of the locker room as Haru tears his throat open shouting, raw and furious, that he has no dream, no future. He doesn’t move, not when Rei and Nagisa arrive by his side, not when Rin looks at him with wild eyes and his teeth bared. Not even when Haru gives him that bitter, twisted up smile, and turns to leave. 

It should be enough, he thinks. To make something beautiful should be enough. It should be. 

It is not.

-

Once, while walking home from school, he asked Haru a question: “What am I to you?”

It had seemed to surprise Haru, because his gaze slid to the floor as he thought about his answer, and Makoto’s stomach had roiled with unease, because he hadn’t known it was a question that needed to be thought about. 

After what felt like an eternity of silence, Haru had looked back at him, his eyes reflecting the evening sun. “There is very little,” he said slowly, “of what you are _not_ to me.”

This, here, is the mire of his aching, a complicated little snarl that Makoto is ashamed to be cradling so close to his chest. It should make him happy, their lives so intertwined that they are almost one person, and yet now, he still thinks of Rin, of the water, of how selfish and greedy he is, wanting to be everything. 

Does that make him a terrible person? Can love make you a terrible person?

(He hopes it’s love. He’s trying really hard to make it love.)

-

Maybe this is where it ends for them. Here in this place, at the turn of the school year, with the shadow of the future looming over like a tidal wave before it finally breaks them apart. He sees it already, in the college applications and the career questionnaires and the eyes of his soon-to-be former classmates, their excited voices carrying in the halls as they talk of chasing money and happiness and dreams. 

“But what if I’m not chasing anything?” he asks, during a counseling session one day. He is sitting in a cold plastic chair, a slip of paper in his hands asking him what he wants, and there is nothing he wants that he does not already have, walking beside him home. “What if there’s nothing for me to chase?”

Across from him, Miss Amakata slants him a knowing look. 

“You want something to chase you?" she says. "Then Tachibana-san, I suggest you run.”

-

“I’m going to Tokyo.”

It’s a story as old as time. Someone always has to leave first, and this is him, leaving, running. He'd always been the one to grab Haru’s hand, but now he is letting go, because that was how he learned how to swim, by letting go of the wall. 

There is an empty space beside him, from where Haru had torn himself away. The night air is cool on his face as he tilts his head up towards the sky, where golden flowers are blooming. From this high up, he can see the lights of the festival below, like blurry fireflies, and the ocean coastline stretching endlessly on both sides of him, cradling their little town of Iwatobi. 

_Sorry about that,_ Makoto thinks. _Sorry about the bony elbows and the wet clothes, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene under the fireworks and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known, Haru, I should’ve known._

The hand that was gripping Haru’s wrist is still warm. He presses it to the cool surface of the balcony. He wants to cry. He won’t. 

-

There’s a saying that applies here: if you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't, they never were. 

It’s a vain thing, to say that he was Haru’s or that Haru was ever his, but he pretends that this is why he texts Rin that afternoon, sweaty fingers fumbling over the keypad of his phone. More truthfully, he’s scared that he’s just killed this thing between them only to realize he can’t live without it. But sometimes you have to. Sometimes you have to break things to know you need them unbroken. Like bones. Like your own heart. 

If you love someone, set them free. This is what Makoto thinks as he waits at the end of the airport terminal, lost in the bustle of families reuniting and harried businessmen rushing to catch their flight, people he’s never met and will probably never see again, hurrying on with their lives. He imagines himself standing in front of a departures screen, eyes flicking over hundreds of strange place names he has never been to. That must be what the future looks like, an endless scroll of possibility, places to leave and places to go and places to return home to. 

If you love someone, set them free. This is what Makoto thinks as the sea of people parts to reveal the red splash of Rin’s hair, and beside him, Haru.

They look happy. Tired, but happy, the both of them tan from the Australian sun and hazy with sleep and jet lag. Haru’s shirt is rumpled and creased in all the wrong places and his hair is flattened on one side, the way it gets when he nods off against the wall during class. His eyes are so very blue.

What part of him did he just give away? What part of him did he just betray? Makoto doesn’t move, held in place by some unspeakable thing that grips his lungs and forces him to stay, and it feels as though his thoughts are being projected onto every flashing screen in the airport, for everyone to see.

His heart pounds and rabbits, beats its fists against his chest. His mouth moves on its own accord.

“Welcome home.”

When Haru smiles at him, it is like the tide coming back in. 

“I’m home,” he replies simply.

-

In the end, there is no one being chased. They go together, side by side, through graduation and onto the plane to Tokyo and to Haru’s first apartment, never a step ahead or behind the other. It was a silly thought in hindsight. They are two people, taken by the water—one by love and one by fear; they were never meant to run. 

These days, Makoto doesn’t swim much. He drinks the terrible cafeteria coffee and pulls late nights just like every other college student. He goes out to bars and restaurants with his new friends, attends game nights and tours Tokyo’s luminous and colorful streets.

Haru swims on his school team. He’s gone almost every weekend for a meet, and when Makoto isn’t studying for an exam, he goes to cheer for him on the bleachers. During the off-season, Haru visits every small coffee shop he can find, sometimes to chat with a teammate of his, sometimes for a quiet place to draw.

There is such a thing as living apart together. Some weeks they go days without speaking, and a year ago Makoto would worry about what that meant for them. But that was a year ago. 

Now, when he lays in the middle of his bed, he knows that Haru is on the other side of the city, under a different ceiling but the same stars. They share the same seconds, the same breath. He knows now that if they break apart there is no question that they will return to each other, as undeniable as the constellations, the movement of ocean currents. Though they take separate trains in the morning, they walk home together each night.

Maybe tomorrow they’ll wake up singing. Maybe tomorrow they’ll wake up in love.

Maybe tomorrow they'll wake with their faces turned towards the sky. 

**Author's Note:**

> You can find this fic [here](https://rudimentaryflair.tumblr.com/post/646123625685139456/love-on-the-water-love-underwater-and-so-on) on Tumblr.


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